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Shivam Vij argued at Kafila how and why he' s a Hindu and not a terrorist. I am wondering what's the thing about being a Hindu that appeals to him.

He says Hinduism is a religion of peace. So what? Many people also say that Islam is a religion of peace. Which doesn't seem to be the case right about now considering the violent reactions of Muslims in many of the world to the silly Prophet Mohammed film.

Muslims always react with violence to similar acts that they consider to be 'insulting' to the Prophet. Islam is a religion where there's no scope for argument. The case is permanently closed.

That is of course not unique to Islam by any stretch of imagination. Closer to home, Hinduism has many mythologies which are funny and ridiculous and otherwise intelligent people somehow suspend their disbelief to agree with obviously stone-age notions.

The irony about Rahul Gandhi's failure is
this.
People may be rejecting his charms -- such
as they are -- but in its place, what are they opting for?
I think they're opting for something worse.
I think people are becoming ever more conscious of various local identities
based on religion, language, caste, etc.
So you have regional Hitlers springing up
all over the country.
Since you mention Uttar Pradesh, the guy
who eventually won, one Mulayam Singh, is apparently known to run his district
in such a manner that the district is 'untouched' by the rule of law or the
machinery of law enforcement. Mulayam is The Law there.
Then there is the satrap named Narendra
Modi who taught a lesson to the Muslims in 2002 and runs a financially
uncorrupted administration focused on development of the state and now based on
his record in Gujarat, aims to become the Prime Minister of India.

So how do people prepare for the time
when they are dead? How well prepared are you? You could say that some people
tend to be better prepared than others. People like Steve Jobs had cancer and
battled it. Some forms of cancer like what Jobs had or what Christopher
Hitchens had are incurable or on the borderline between curable and incurable. If you happen to get one of these
ailments, of course you know that your time on Earth will
soon be up. Not that anyone is ever immortal. So far. So I don’t know if it really matters much
if we happen to get a form of cancer or inoperable brain tumor or glioblastoma
like Ted Kennedy. And what does one do about one’s vast
wealth after one’s body becomes one with nature? Well, luckily or unluckily, most of us in
India don’t have to worry about such matters as not many of us are billionaires
with our personal 30-storey buildings. But here are a few examples of some
famous folks and their instructions about stuff to be done when they died.

I read the cover story on Newsweek
which talks about whether a college degree is all that it is cracked up to be.I don't
even want to talk here about stingy and weird American parents who pretend to
be martyrs or heroes just because they 'paid' for their kids' college
education. I mean ... Anyway, here's
a look at the economic brute facts of life for Americans and people of other
advanced/developed nations. Some things appear obvious to me as an Indian:

Americans
whose mother tongue is English should not have to go to university to learn
English. Not in the 21st century.Less
lawyers are better.Progress
is unidirectional and not cyclical. The assembly line of Ford is not going to
be re-invented. Ever. Hopefully we'll also never again be making airplanes and
tanks by the thousands in assembly lines. Thousands of women are not going to
be sitting at telephone exchanges. Managers typically work without secretaries now.We
live in a world of robotic assembly lines. The…

I have had this
idea probably since a decade and a half. My idea is
simply this: why can’t there be a permanent full moon out there in the evening
sky? Of course, those of you who have always been city dwellers need to get out
of your cities and go into the countryside and experience a moonless starry
night for yourselves and see the dazzling vista that it presents. And you need
to sit on a sea beach on an evening when there is a full moon in the sky and
experience something which is awe-inspiring and timeless. We need to find time
in our busy lives to spend some time in the lap of nature and reflect on the
grandeur of the universe which has been there for almost forever and unless we
humans do something drastic selfishly, will go on almost forever as well. Why I
use the word ‘almost’ is because, of course, nothing in nature is permanent –
nothing really lasts forever. Even the
mountains and the oceans and indeed this planet that we inhabit and the moon
that we admire and the sun which…

Sachi Mohanty

My favorite words at present: There are no lessons to be learnt, no
discoveries to be made, no solutions to offer. I find myself left with
nothing but a few random thoughts. One of them is that from up here I
can look back and see that although a human life is less than the blink
of an eyelid in terms of the universe, within its own framework it is
amazingly capacious so that it can contain many opposites. One life can
contain serenity and tumult, heartbreak and happiness, coldness and
warmth, grabbing and giving — and also more particular opposites such as
a neurotic conviction that one is a flop and a consciousness of success
amounting to smugness.

I think I am a born rebel or a subversive. I am definitely an atheist. I sometimes feel that in a country as suffocatingly religious as India, some of us have to go to the other extreme as a counterweight to all the religious blindness which is there.